Chapter 5 #2
A muffled bang. It’s coming from Jake’s bedroom. And a sob. I drag myself upstairs, stomach churning. What’s wrong? He’s seemed withdrawn, lately, even more grumpy than usual, communicating in an ever-shortening series of grunts.
I push his door open. He is sitting on his bed, head in his hands, iPad sprawled on the floor with its cover half off and a crack creeping across the screen.
‘Did you… did you throw that?’
He shrugs.
I pick it up, noticing it’s still open to an Instagram post. He grabs it off me, slams it onto the bed face first. ‘Leave it, Mum.’
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’ His nothing is so packed with somethings it is glaringly obvious it is not nothing at all.
‘Jake? Tell me, love. I want to help.’
He glowers up at me, eyes narrowed. ‘You can’t do a thing.’ His voice so drips with resentment that I flinch.
‘Jake, please, what is it? Is it someone at school?’
‘You could say that.’
I grab his iPad. I know in this moment that I shouldn’t do that, that fifteen-year-olds need their privacy, but I do it anyway.
I grab it and I find the Instagram post and see the picture and the comments.
It’s one of those meme things Jake is always showing me, but this time it is a picture of Jake’s head badly photoshopped onto the body of a skinny, frail old man and the word ‘FAIL’ in big shouty letters stamped across the image.
And then the comments, etching themselves into my brain so sharply I know they will never peel away.
2010alex: so that happened
charlotte2011: what happened?
gamer_boyunseen: so you know that thorpe park trip? We lost it cos JF skipped school again and so yr 10 got it instead
charlotte2011: how is that fair???
2010alex: that’s how it works. U have to get like 99% attendance to win the trip, sirs been yabbering on about it all yr
gamer_boyunseen: yeah and if it weren’t for him we’d be going. We should do something
taylorrules: why didn’t he come into school? Was he ill? Cos that seems a bit mean tbh
gamer_boyunseen: nah it was his stupid mum again shes always sick shes like one of them hypochondriac people, u know. Hes always skipping school cos of her and so we keep missing out on the class attendance things like we did last yr too remember?
taylorrules: yeah but it’s not really his fault
2010alex: how’s it not his fault, he’s 15 not 5
gamer_boyunseen: we should sort him out
The tears push at my eyes but freeze there as they always do. Jake sits on his bed, picking at his fingernails and ignoring my gaze. His mouth quivers just a tiny bit and I want to go, to take him in my arms and tell him that I love him, to tell him it will all be okay.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say.
‘Not your fault.’
But it is my fault, isn’t it? It’s my fault that Jake sometimes misses school because I’m so sick I need him to keep me safe or I can’t take him if the bus doesn’t come.
It’s not my fault the school has a ridiculous system that penalises students who are absent for any reason at all, but it is my fault that I can’t always manage to get Jake there, like a good parent should.
I bend down and take his hand, but he slaps me away and turns his back on me.
I know that I shouldn’t have pushed, that I shouldn’t have looked on his iPad.
I know it is something he just has to deal with.
Just another layer of guilt for me to take away and feed into the recurring script scrolling through my mind. Useless mum. Useless me.
???
I gaze at him now, remembering how he was with me and gritting my teeth. Don’t push, Penny. Not this time. Don’t press him so hard he runs away.
‘Well,’ I say. ‘You know where I am if you need me.’
He looks up at me, eyebrows raised. ‘Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Mum.’
Jodie is watching us, staring without apology.
‘What d’you want?’ he says, rolling his eyes at her.
‘Nothing,’ she says, in an eerily precise parody of his own nothing from a moment ago, a kind of exaggerated adolescent grunt. His mouth curls up at the corners.
I look over to Barbara’s corner. ‘Does she never get visitors?’ I ask Jodie.
‘Not while I’ve been in, and that’s over a week now.’
‘That’s so sad.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I wonder where her family is.’
Jodie shrugs. ‘Dunno.’
Violet is propped up in bed, listening in to every word.
She’s dressed in pink satin pyjamas and a hideous monstrosity of a dressing gown, all loud purple and red flowers clamouring for space on padded staticky polyester.
It’s a shapeless beast, reaching the floor, straight up and down with a zip all the way down the front.
‘It’s like a seventies toilet tent,’ Jodie said earlier when she first donned it.
‘She should take it to Glastonbury.’ Violet didn’t hear her but I giggled and it hurt.
‘My husband will be here any minute,’ Violet says in a voice so dripping with pomposity it sounds like it wishes to audition for the role of a BBC presenter circa 1950 but doesn’t quite make the grade. ‘He’s bringing me some proper coffee.’
‘Good to hear,’ Jake says, and I nudge him. He rolls his eyes at me.
‘And a proper walker, at that.’
‘Walker?’ Jodie says.
‘These ones in the hospital are hopeless. Squeaky. And dirty.’
‘Oh—’
‘And I want to get to the toilet myself, thank you very much, not have some filthy cardboard pot in a chair brought over to me like I’m some helpless old woman. When I have my own walker, I can do that. It has a little seat, you see.’
Jodie nods, eyes wide and guileless. ‘I see.’
Jake’s mouth curls in great snarky coils.
A man walks into the bay. He can’t be Violet’s husband.
Far too young and un-Violet like. He stops in the entrance, searching the beds, settling on Kat’s.
Relief and something more upturns his mouth in a great big grin, white teeth gleaming in the straightest smile I’ve ever seen.
I watch Violet watching him. The lines and etchings on her face veer up and down in great animation, a mix of disapproval and incomprehension.
The man is holding a packet of chocolate hobnobs and a big purple Bible.
He’s wearing a dog collar tucked into a neat blue clerical shirt.
Violet’s eyes have almost disappeared into the folds of skin crinkled up on her face and waves of disdain emanate from her as he bends and kisses Kat full on the mouth.
It’s not only that Kat is married to a vicar, though.
I can read Violet’s thinking, almost plain as day written across her face.
It’s that Kat, with her purple hair, her tattoos and her piercings, is married to a tall Black vicar in ripped skinny jeans.
Jodie is agog, too. ‘He’s a bit of all right, isn’t he? I’d go to church if he was vicaring it or whatever.’
Kat just beams. It’s the first time I’ve seen her sitting up, engaged, smiling.
I’m glad. I was worried for her in the night, when her soft, choked sobs carried over to my bed in waves.
There’s colour in her face now, whether through feeling a little better or seeing her husband, who blatantly adores her.
‘Hobnobs and my Bible,’ she says. ‘My hero.’
That’s when Violet’s husband walks in. I know he’s Violet’s husband, just in the way that anyone knows anything.
He looks a lot like her, in his facial features at least, despite an arresting bristly moustache.
Maybe it’s his expression, one of slight antipathy and distaste, as if he has taken a bite of the world around him and found it wanting, ready to spit it out in disgust. He stares around the ward, taking us all in, Jodie and Jake staring right back at him.
‘Why does he have a toilet brush on his face?’ Jake whispers, and Jodie laughs out loud.
He’s much smaller than her, though, thin and wiry, sinewy where Violet is softened by age and plumpness. He ignores us and walks over to her, each step measured and careful, grimaces at the plastic chair by her bed, and perches on the very edge. ‘Hello, dear.’
‘Hello, dear.’
‘Hello, dear,’ Jake says, and Jodie laughs again.
I’m going to have to watch these two. Maybe it’s like having another child, like trying to deal with siblings who wind one another up.
I never got a chance to find out what that would be like, at least for myself.
My own sister is much older than me and far distant, even as a child, always achieving more and better and being the one my parents liked to wax lyrical about in their Christmas Round Robins.
Karen has passed her Grade 8 violin this year, as well as coaching primary age children in gymnastics, getting her gold Duke of Edinburgh award and scoring A*s in all her A Levels.
Penny has only been in hospital twice this year. That kind of thing.
Watching Violet and her husband is mesmerising. They seem to mirror one another in all their words and actions, like an ultimate version of his ’n hers. I bet they have matching orange cagoules and walking boots.
Her face is all scrunched into a slicing glare. ‘Where is my coffee? And my walker?’
He opens his eyes wide; a rabbit in the headlights. ‘Oh. Oh. I… I forgot.’
Violet folds her arms and flattens out her lips.
He lays his hand on her knee. ‘I’ll bring them tomorrow. I promise.’
She raises her chin and then slowly turns her face away.
‘Forgive me,’ he says.
‘You’ll bring in some Garibaldi, then, too? From Waitrose, not Asda?’
He nods, his moustache all animated in the fervent rhythm of it.
Jake clears his throat. ‘Fly biscuits.’
‘Are you well, dear?’ Violet’s husband says.
‘Could be better. That woman screamed all night.’ She points at Barbara, who is oblivious, slumped low in her chair with her head thrown back and mouth open in a slight snore. She looks tiny, lost like a small child in a huge beanbag.
Mr Oddens’ mouth is an oh of outrage. ‘They should give you your own room, out of this awful place.’ He lowers his voice.
‘With people like that.’ He’s looking at Barbara still, but I know who he’s really talking about.
Thankfully Amina is screened behind the curtain pulled between them, deep in happy conversation with her family.
‘I know. I said that to them when they brought me in here. But they took no notice.’
‘That’s disgusting.’
Jodie sniggers and mouths something at Jake.
Kane walks in with his phone in his hand, nods to Jake and me, glances at Kat and her husband and then does a double take, another furtive glance. ‘See we’ve got the reverend in here.’
‘Yeah, and he’s hot.’ Jodie simpers up at him, searching his face, waiting for him to laugh.
He flops on the chair and picks up her hand. Rubs it gently. ‘Say again?’
Somehow, he manages to load soft words with a ton of menace.
Jodie stops. Gulps. ‘Um… I mean, he’s hot, it’s hot in here, isn’t it?’
It’s always unbearably hot on the wards. But Kane is not taken in, and his response takes me hurtling back into a time I don’t want to revisit.
He doesn’t say anything. He just sits, with his hand flat over Jodie’s hand, staring into her eyes.
I shiver.
???
Kane doesn’t stay long today, but his presence casts a shadow over the ward, like an arctic wind creeping in and cooling the atmosphere.
Jodie is quiet for a while after he leaves, silent even when Kat’s and Violet’s husbands leave.
Jake is still here, playing Tetris on his phone, flouting visiting hours.
‘I don’t want to go back to Nan’s, Mum.’
I don’t ask him why they haven’t come to visit me.
‘So,’ Violet says to Kat. ‘You’re a vicar’s wife, then?’ Her tone is loaded with incredulity and derision all at the same time.
Kat shakes her head. ‘Actually, I’m a vicar. And so is my husband. He’s called Nate.’
Violet’s mind is blown. You can see it in the whites of her fingertips clasping the neck of her polyester dressing gown tightly around her. ‘You’re a vicar?’
‘Yup.’
Violet sniffs. ‘Well. That’s new.’
Kat catches me listening in and winks. I avert my gaze, thinking about the faith I had as a child that faded over years of pain, something echoing in the far reaches of me.
Jodie peels herself off her bed and collects up her smoking equipment. She eyes Violet then turns to Jake. ‘Wonder if her husband has the Dressing Gown of Doom as well as her.’
Jake giggles. ‘Probably.’
Jodie turns to Kat as she leaves the bay. ‘Didn’t know you was a Bible bashing type. Don’t get that myself, but each to their own.’
Kat just smiles a weary smile and leans her head back on her pillow, closing her eyes.